As is the case, business can be cyclic. This includes our schedule release around the company.

Over the next 14 days we have two major release, and one major relaunch. Which means my time is soaked up running around getting all them ducks in a row.

But to make up for this being a wasted post - lets talk about focus

As someone who has worn the programmer, writer, and manager hat many a times, each one requires a different state of mind.

And while environment is very important, so is your state of mind. I have found myself to work better in the mornings (ie I start working at 7 am). When I was in university, my day started around 2pm and usually ended at 7 am (class was a complete after-thought). It took me a while to realize that when it comes to using my brain in a powerful way - I like waking up when everything around me is waking up. Our dogs wake up. The birds are outside chirping. It feels right to me.

But of course - you are your own person.

Other factors come in too. While people talk about not interrupting programmers, it is even worse when you are trying to strategize/outline (ie manage). When it came to programming, my biggest qualm was time. I needed at least two hours of solid ‘programming-time’. In between I could get interrupted, and not lose my flow. Often times I message someone for help. I have found programming so exhausting that a little break here and there is good. But when it comes to managing something and outlining how you want it to work - interruption is deadly. The operations of a website don’t just come to you - they have to be carefully planned, looking over every detail. And a single interruption can break that flow of details in your head.

Still - you are your own person.

Phones - I hate them. More than anything else it is because I don’t have a log to look over (when I forget a detail). We setup our own jabber client so that we could talk to each other at all times without having to worry about interruptions from friends or family. I do type fast - I actually took a typing class in higschool where they taught us to type on typewriters. I type fast. Even for someone tech-oriented. I blow a keyboard roughly once a year - by the time I am done the letters are worn off, the keyboard’s little stands on the back are broken, and a few keys might not even respond properly. I’ve used my current keyboard (Microsoft ergonomic) for roughly 6 months, and the letters E R I K L M N V B C S D G ENTER HOME END are all gone. As are the four arrow keys. But text can be incredibly frustrating when trying to convey meaning. Tonality is such a key element of conversation that I end up using emoticons to make sure the meaning comes across right. And phone calls can be great for focusing on one topic.

As always - you are your own person.

So - while people always have great tips on how to be more productive, on how to focus, etc - try various things yourself. Try out different things - you may learn things about yourself you never knew (if you told me five-years ago that I am a morning person, I woulda scoffed).

Yesterday was Apple’s WWDC 2007 event, complete with Steve Jobs’ keynote (many people felt disappointed by the announcements, but the hype was just nutty). We ourselves covered it live as it happened.

While it was going on, I went around and surfed other Mac sites. And what I found was highway robbery.

When all was said and done, we pushed roughly 150,000 pageviews during that event. People were refreshing the live page like mad, wanting to know what was going on.

It also made sense not to have any advertisements on that website - if someone is following a liveblogging event, that isn’t normal user behavior. They won’t look around at the site. They have one singular purpose - to get the news as it happens.

So when I visited sites like Engadget, all I could think of was - highway robbery.

Engadget is a big site, so a good example. If we did 150,000 pageviews, it is safe to say they did 1.5 million pageviews. For those looking at it from an advertiser’s perspective, 1500 blocks of 1000 ads.

The liveblogging that Engadget did was on a regular blog post. So people, wanting to know what was going on, kept refreshing that post. That post (of course) was complete with ads. So - if I was an advertiser paying $5 CPM, I basically just got burnt for $7500.

Donna Bogatin covered Greg Stuart’s keynote where he argued that of the $295 billion spent in advertising ever year, over $112 billion is wasted.

Ad networks are supposedly going to be more pro-active and assigning ‘quality scores’ to sites based on their advertising response - sites that throw up ads while doing a liveblogging event need to be hit hard.

Wired has the story how Geomas is suing Verizon, claiming that they infringe patent No. 5,930,474, for an “Internet Organizer for Accessing Geographically and Topically Based Information.”

The repercussions (if Geomas wins) could be far-reaching into the local sphere -

The patent describes an internet search functionality in which users can locate a topic or business based on their location. If you’ve ever looked for a nearby doctor or plumber online using your ZIP code or city, according to Geomas, the site you used likely infringed upon the patent. “In a perfect world, we commercialize the technology and grab licensing fees,” said Jason Galanis, founder of Geomas, which was formerly called Yellowone Investments. “We aren’t necessarily looking to sue as our main business, but realistically I think that’s going to have to happen.”

Praized has a few more thoughts.

I recently finished reading this man’s biography - absolutely stunning what lengths he goes to help people. Read about Edhi on Wikipedia, and read about his foundation.

A choice quote form Wikipedia:

His son Faisal once stated that when the Foundation was setting up in Afghanistan, local staff had purchased chairs for guests and the press when a new center was being opened, when Edhi arrived he was furious because the money that was spent on the chairs could have been used to help people, that night he slept on the clinic floor with the ambulance drivers.

iBegin Source has been a learning experience that has opened my eyes a lot - sales cycle, perceived value, etc etc.

We’ve had a lot of experience with doing small sales (< $500) - eg ForumTemplates (in the last 22 minutes the site has had five sales at $17.00 each). Automated processes, quick and detailed instructions, forum for general support (everyone can ‘learn’ together), etc.

iBegin Source has been a different beast. A few of the following points to learn:

1. Perception. Price in itself is a huge part of the perception. Would a Ferrari be a Ferrari if it was priced at $100,000? Whenever you sell something, you have a markup - the revenue on a sale minus the cost of good + cost of sales. So when people see $40,000/$1000 they think - “this can’t be right” or “they must just be resellers”. We are neither. We’ve invested a lot into this project, but - data sales is not the end all be all. If we don’t make a penny from sales, we are still okay. The reality is that we created this system as a way of powering iBegin city sites across North America. We have only ourselves to blame - our story (which is unique) isn’t published properly. Need to fix that.
2. People are demanding. For example geocoding - its an imprecise science. No one has 100% coverage (it is impossible - no central place for all geodata. Even the US government’s data is incomplete). Managing expectations is hard - I’m not saying bad data is okay, I’m saying that just like you didn’t expect to get 100% on every test you took, local data is so dirty and murky that the same rules apply here. The only solution? Honest answers. We had a buyer of Florida data point out an error we had. We immediately thanked him, and said we would get back to him. In 24 hours we had identified the problem (incidentally it only affected Florida), explained what had happened, and let him know we had fixed it.
3. The sales cycle is long. It can be very long. We have big (ie massive) who contacted us on the day we launched, and take weeks to reply. Various department heads ask the same questions. Sometimes the person him/herself asks the same question again. On the individual/start-up level, the same questions exist. A big question - can they trust us to be around in a year? Five years? (more on that in a bulletpoint below). We had one customer contact us within two weeks of us launching. Last week he purchased one state (an 80 day turnaround). He has promised to buy the full data, but I assume that will take another 2-3 months. So almost 6 months to go from initial contact to sales. That isn’t a small cycle (then again quite a few have bought without even contacting us, so there are two sides to every story).
4. Branding. This is different by perception - perception is more about the quality of the data, whereas branding is more about the quality of the company. Can we be trusted? If we aren’t funded, how are we doing this? Are we scraping results? (to answer those: yes, we’ve grown organically over many years, and no). This again points out ‘our story’ - it is unique, and we should be proud of it (not that we aren’t, we just don’t show it off). The old adage of “no one ever got fired for buying from IBM” bites us square in the butt here.
5. Flexibility. The beforementioned forum templates sales are easy - it is a design, and you buy in. Some customers asked that the header be customized, but that is all very easy to do. When it comes to business data - requests are all over the ballpark. From a single category in a single city (eg ‘Vegas Restaurants’) to asking to use data on upto a million domains (seriously), people have different needs. In most cases we have stuck to the system. Our entire pricing system focuses on efficiently handling scale and sales - 10 customers or 1000 customers, our internal backend works the same. In some special cases we do bend (eg using the data on multiple domains), but in almost all cases we stick to the system. In the short-term this may not be the best idea, but it lets us focus on the core data and the systems that deliver it. I believe this approach will bear fruit in the future.
6. Misinformation. iBegin does local - our internal motto is “We do Local”. That confuses people sometimes - why not focus on one thing? (because everything is related - by bringing it all ‘in house’ we can ensure much better quality and reliability throughout the entire site). Competitors haven’t helped - I’ve received some choice quotes from prospective customers where they were given totally incorrect information (the one that grates my nerves the most is that we crawl the internet for our information).
7. Proof. This one is the hardest - people want to see sites using our data. I’ve been shown some very interesting sites using our data, but they aren’t ready to launch. We launched less than 90 days ago, our sales cycles are long, and building a website with a ton of data isn’t easy. The one benefit we do have is some launched quickly (eg RestuarantReviews.com, and we have our own iBegin City sites to show off).

All in all - very different from our previous sales experience (through our customers and our own stuff, we’ve pushed over $20,000,000 worth of ‘goods’ over the years).

So with all this in mind, we are going to slightly change our approach. Sales cycle, proof, and (to a certain degree) branding & perception - those are things with don’t have control over. We know we’ve been around for a while. We know we are cash-flow positive. We know that this data is mission critical important to us. But we cannot prove that immediately. Over time, people will see that not only are we still around, but we are thriving. Our sales are already up - time will only help.

In the meantime? We focus on iBegin v3 and iBegin Partners - more on that soon.

A side project we did a long-long time ago was Local Moa - a very simple New Zealand local-search.

We haven’t updated it since day one (we will definitely be re-visiting it sometime soon).

What is interesting is that the # of contacts has gone up, and today alone we received four. Traffic has gone up, and now does about 425 unique visitors a day.

Not a lot really. But - The population of New Zealand is 4.11 million (according to the CIA). In that context, we reach 0.01% of the country’s population, every day

With a total investment under 20 hours, in a month we reach roughly 0.20% of the country’s population. I think thats pretty cool.

Me and the missus were at the local Target today, looking for some odd and misc stuff.

We circled the entire store before we came across something we were looking for - full-length mirrors.

Wouldn’t it make sense for retail stores to have a little ’search kiosk’ at the end of each aisle? Let me put in a keyword (I’m sure they have meta-data associated with all their products), and it can tell me what aisle I should go to.

Wandering out? Not fun. Asking people? I don’t mind, but quite a few don’t. And as the population becomes more and more tech-savvy, it just makes sense.

I’m only doing this because I find Aaron and his FindBuffalo.com so interesting

I’m gonna partially cheat and pull out five from my about page:

1. I’ve spent an average of 16 months in any one residence. Shortest was roughly 3 months, longest was roughly four years.
2. I created a sponsorship at the University of Toronto while still a student. It took over a year to happen because the person in scholarships thought I was pulling a prank and refused to listen to me (seriously - I even ended up going to the dean). It was only after she left that anything happened (I initiated this in my third year, and it was formed and paid for in the fourth year).
3. My family’s diversity is … unique. Our ethnicity is Kashmiri (the piece of land that India and Pakistan keep fighting over), and I am a Canadian citizen. My brother is married to a Vietnamese who converted to Islam. My older sister is married to an Indian Hindu. I am engaged to an American Christian (I myself am a Muslim). Smorgasboard of cultures!
4. I used to be a damn good soccer defender (center fullback). Then I destroyed my knee, and now I can’t even jog for 5 minutes without it tightening up.
5. I was Yantis’ righthand man in the MMO space. Every single one of his acquisitions were driven by me, from $1000 to $100,000+ I caused Sony/Blizzard/etc massive headaches without them knowing who I was Which was fine by me.
6. I was born left-handed, but my parents ‘encouraged’ me to use my left hand. I write using my righthand, have much more control with my right, but simple physical tasks (opening up a jar, turning the knob, etc) - I use my left. Even trying to use my right makes me uncomfortable.
7. I have two dogs - one is a diminutive 9lb (he was a runt), and the other weighs more than my fiancee.
8. I miss the bums of Toronto. Weird for sure, but they do (entertaining) nutty stuff. It makes life interesting.

I do a pretty good job on keeping an eye on what is going around in the markets around me. I also have our brand names subscribed so I know what is going on there.

But - I miss things. I’m not obsessive like some people.

So when I accidentally stumbled upon this 8 facts meme, noticed my name was there, and then realized it was 6 days old, I thought - ‘oops’. Then I thought - how would I know about this? No one contacted me (I do watch comments/emails like a hawk). You can’t expect me to know - you have to ping them.

So Aaron (and I know you read this blog) - a thought for the future

I know quite a few domainers. I’ve talked about them on this blog, defending their business quite a few time.

Yet … some struggle a bit.

You can get some background information here.

Notable from the Wadnd site:

Due to disruption of proceedings at T.R.A.F.F.I.C. caused by certain persons, groups or companies arranging private parties or gatherings while events are occurring, the Board voted unanimously that any function, party or gathering by written or verbal invitation by any person, group or company before 9:30P.M. on the first, second or third full day of T.R.A.F.F.I.C. shall be strictly prohibited and any violators shall be excluded from any future T.R.A.F.F.I.C. CONFERENCE AND TRADE SHOW. Sponsors pay to have full attendance at Breakfast, Lunch or Dinner and it is not fair to them to have competing functions small or large before 9:30 P.M.

I’ve been to quite a few conferences, and private events happen all the time. I would think that if I paid, I can bloody do well what I want (and I’ve mentioned how much I hate people who think they are the guiding moral light).

And the real kicker?

Unethical.com - you’ve gotta be kidding me.